Samsung hosts SF developer conference in bid for greater loyalty

The event will be at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in Union Square on Oct. 27-29, with sessions focused on developing for mobile, TV, gaming, wearables and more.

“We have over 50 different tracks and sessions, so we’re covering a large scale of different technologies and business opportunities,” said Curtis Sasaki, senior vice president of Samsung’s Media Solutions Center of America.

The question is: Why is a hardware manufacturer that mostly relies on others for its operating systems hosting a conference for software developers?

There’s an ongoing war for customer loyalty between tech giants like Google, Apple and Microsoft, and each have built sprawling ecosystems of apps, media offerings and communications tools that keep people tied into their services.

In basing most of its devices on Google’s Android operating system, Samsung has been left to compete mostly on hardware features — like the megapixels in the camera, the size of the screen and, more unusually, the stylus for certain phones.

The company has obviously done well for themselves, with the highest worldwide marketshare for smart phones. But hardware features aren’t nearly as sticky as ecosystems, said Charles Golvin, an independent analyst focused on mobile.

Moore’s law means next year’s model can always pack in faster speeds or more memory, no matter who makes it. But consumers are loath to move all their photos, email, music or video, or start rebuilding those libraries on a new service.

“It’s harder to escape the gravitational pull of the ecosystem,” Golvin said. “Many of these benefits are not really accruing to Samsung. They have devices, people who buy them tend to really like them, but the applications are mostly being sold through Google.”

So Samsung is simply trying to create more reasons for you to go with and stick with their devices. They’re attempting to draw developers who will build apps that work on Android, but take advantage of special capabilities of Samsung phones, be they that stylus or the multi-window feature that allows consumers to use more than one app at once.

The apps would work on other Android phones, but those special capabilities would be exclusive to Samsung devices.

“There’s hundreds of thousands of applications and developers want to figure out how they can rise above the other apps out there and differentiate themselves,” Sasaki said.

He said another big goal at the conference is to encourage developers to build apps that work across screens, spreading parts of the consumer experience over phones, tablets and TVs. Meanwhile, the company is seeking to distinguish its devices on security with KNOX, an effort to provide businesses greater power to ensure corporate data is safe even on their workers’ personal phones.

But it remains to be seen whether this does enough to ensure loyalty, and Samsung is hedging its bets. It’s been working with Intel and others on an alternative open source mobile operating system known as Tizen. The first phone running on the OS is now expected to hit the market early next year.

It provides an opportunity for Samsung to strengthen its own ecosystem, but comes with the big challenge of luring developers to an unproven platform.

There’s also been speculation that Samsung could “fork” Android, do it’s own twist on the open source software as Amazon did with the Kindle Fire. The devices would still run most Android apps, while allowing them to insert their own store, services and content.

But Google has taken specific steps to make that a risky gambit, as a growing number of the company’s popular services and features only work on its favored flavor of Android. (Or as the tech blog Ars Technica put it in a headline, “Android is open, expect for all the good parts”.)

Sasaki said none of their moves to differentiate represent preliminary steps toward forking Android, and Golvin thinks the costs of doing so would be too high for Samsung to dare try.

“I think Tizen is their ‘go-it-alone’ strategy and one that pays much greater dividends for them in the long run,” he said.